Fida remembered the surgeon from the brush mosque. Could he really have been consumed? Yet how could he not have been?
In the Eritrean scheme, surgeons were quite irreplaceable.
Fida could see the militiamen futilely circling the blazing village at whose core the mosque had by now been consumed. From the hill behind Tessfaha and Fida came contradictory noises, the wailing of children and the cheers of gunners.
Later in the afternoon, Tessfaha himself went down to the smoking environs of the mosque, but he did not insist that Fida come with him. The colonel’s behavior remained very correct, therefore, both in terms of international law and of the obsessive etiquette the Eritreans seemed to practice. This politeness rose from the Eritreans’ historic function as a conduit of trade between the Red Sea and the upper Nile. The line of major Eritrean cities presently held by the Ethiopian army ran east to west, demarking this ancient line of commerce. Massawa, Asmara, Agordat, Keren, Tessenai, Barentu. Trade maketh manners, Fida believed.
Tessfaha returned to the bunker at dusk. He seemed reflective, and his clothes reeked of napalm. The militiaman with the limpid Tigrean voice brought them more tea and the same unleavened bread they had had at dawn. Pensively slurping his tea, Tessfaha remarked, “They tell me the pilot is dead.”
Fida wondered what that meant but did not want to discuss pilots or planes. It was a difficult subject in this reeking air.
“I think we will spend the night beyond Moshkub,” Tessfaha suggested.
“Will I see the pilot?” Fida asked him.
“If you wish,” said Tessfaha.
The terrible, assertively industrial smell pursued them all the way up the defile and into the mountains beyond. They reached a mountaintop where young gunners lolled in cloaks and shorts and British-style gaiters. Beyond the summit a long valley stretched away obliquely, full of blue light. Along its slopes Fida saw chattering and chirruping squads of Eritrean gunners, men and women. The girl artillerists chuckled liquidly through their white teeth. Descending to the bottom of the valley, leaping from one unsteady platform to another, Tessfaha and Fida joined them around a large bonfire. The air was celebratory, and the gunners were passing round a powdered-milk can full of the opaque liquor called sewa. Half-embarrassed, an Eritrean girl, full-breasted within her khaki shirt, gave the can to Fida, and as he drank he saw a few of the other young rebels stealing glimpses at him. Yet no one uttered accusations.
A certain 56-millimeter crew had been credited with destroying the MIG. One by one they were forced to their feet and were tunefully applauded in something just short of full-fledged song. Then a soldier produced the kirir and began to sing a favorite martial Eritrean song.
Hail the heroes of Sahel,
Who feast on song and dance
After a hard day’s fight,
Carousing in the wilderness
With Kalashin and Bren in the pledge’s solemn celebration.
Hail the Red Flowers and the Vanguards,
Being forged in the fire of Sahel!
Performing the chain of the sentinel’s vigil,
To guard the front in the people’s war.
In their hands our dignity is safe …
Tessfaha and Fida left the bonfire and moved farther down the valley. The Ethiopian pilot, Tessfaha said, had died during ejection. He must have struck his head on the canopy, yet when he landed he looked so perfectly composed the gunners had not been able to understand what had befallen him. There were no visible marks of injury.
At each bonfire they passed on their way to visit the Ethiopian pilot they were forced to drink sewa, and Fida drank it gratefully until his senses began to hum, to vibrate sweetly. It took a mile of libations before they reached the bunker where the pilot lay. When Tessfaha threw torchlight over the man’s face, he did indeed look composed and uninjured. Fida noticed particularly his officer corps moustache, which was, in imitation of Mengistu the demagogue, neatly clipped. His name was stenciled on his jacket—Captain Kebede. When struck by the shell, he had not had the same height of sky Fida had—in similar circumstances—enjoyed. He had been unlucky in his body alignment as well. Yet only a slight dislodging of the forehead and a bruising under the eyes indicated it.
As Kebede would no doubt have wanted, Fida made small crosses with his right thumb on the man’s eyelids, nostrils, lips, and on the lobes of his ears.
They urinated on the slope behind the bunker. In the midst of his flow, Tessfaha spoke in his normal reflective way. “Did you notice one of them attacked the garden at Moshkub? Turned it into two craters. Do the pilots know what they are doing?” The question had no venom to it. “Do their superiors tell them that if you bomb an acre of the sub-Sahara, you turn it into Sahara? You do the desert’s own work and spread dust all the way to the Red Sea! Do they tell them that?”
Fida had his back half-turned to Tessfaha. “Of course no one ever talks like that. Briefings are not such philosophic affairs.”
“I suppose not,” said Tessfaha.
Tessfaha finished first and buttoned up. The Eritreans did not favor zippers, which they considered susceptible to dust and rust and other low comedies. “We have only one answer to this fire from the air. Years back we entered Asmara airport and blew up more than thirty aircraft.”
Fida had, of course, heard of that occasion but said nothing.
“We have been preparing for another such raid, but our agent in matters to do with the Asmara field has been arrested. I regret very much dragging you around from mountain to mountain; as you say, it is not according to the letter of the international convention. But we believe that we need a true Amhara, a supreme Ethiopian familiar with the premises, to take us there once more.”
Fida, buttoning up, felt giddy. The mountains spun around his head as they must have by daylight for Captain Kebede in the instant of his ejection.
Tessfaha said, “We have never asked anything of Ethiopian prisoners except that they attend Eritrean history classes. This is larger, I confess. But consider what an economic blow it would be now. Not simply a military affair. Something with economic, political, diplomatic results. Replacement costs alone could bring Mengistu down, coud cause the Soviets and the Ethiopian generals to cry ‘Enough!’ And, of course, you realize that none of your colleagues are likely to see their families until ‘enough’ is cried. Another consideration perhaps.”
Fida was both excited and drunkenly angry at the idea. He saw his fury vaporize above him in the mountain air, and he began to shiver. “I cannot do it to my country,” he told Tessfaha, “and it can’t be asked of me.”
“We would intercept and seize a military supply column outside of Asmara. Then you could lead it into the perimeter for us. Only you know where everything is behind the security wall they erected after our last raid. Only you know where are the hangars, the fuel and bomb dumps, even the napalm.”
“They were not using napalm when I was stationed there,” Fida insisted.
Tessfaha considered him, seeming—worst of all—to believe him.
“Well,” Tessfaha conceded, “let us forget napalm for the moment. You know where the Soviet military men are billeted. Imagine the value to us of holding a Russian officer! The Soviets would need then to negotiate with us directly!”
And so that most important debate of Major Fida’s life, one he could not even have imagined a year before, continued on the slope outside the bunker where Captain Kebede lay.
At last Tessfaha caressed Fida’s shoulders and began to lead him back toward the campfires and the liquor and the girl soldiers with gleaming mouths and white cloaks. As they walked, the Eritrean said, “Forget everything for the moment. But I know napalm appalls you. The Sahara appalls you. They are a blot on your honor.”
Fida yearned to deny it. The noise of the young carousers, however, consumed him before he could frame words.
The Groves of Jani
I knew that the Eritrean front line was divided into the Nacfa Front at the easter
n end, the Hallal Front at the western. At Himbol and She’b we were far from the Hallal, and it was toward Jani, behind the Hallal, that Masihi had fled—or at least fleeing was how I irrationally saw it.
We who had experienced together the descent of the locusts and who had, through the drift of events, taken on the stature of attendants at the reunion of father and daughter, now began to suffer even more intense discomforts. Leaving the p.o.w. camp in She’b, still unreconciled—at least in my case—to all that happened there, we spent two nights lurching toward Jani, where Masihi was rumored to be. In the high, gritty hills beyond Himbol we bogged in sand too many times. In the jungle swamp of Zara we stuck in the mud. It seemed as dawn neared that we would have to abandon the truck, hide for the day, wait until some heavier machinery arrived to haul it loose. I saw Henry apply his shoulder to the back wall of the vehicle, strain against it when Moka and Tecleh, the driver, gave the order, and then stagger off into the bush. Christine was still stricken as well. Conversation was rudimentary and likely to be broken off halfway through short sentences.
In jungly Zara we slept on a hospital verandah, surrounded by fever patients wrapped in their cloaks. Wheezing but undefeated, Moka shuffled around like a duty nurse, checking our mute faces. As he swung his torch, I saw mosquitoes in a mist around Lady Julia.
“A fucking Sheraton of mosquitoes,” growled Henry as we suffered Zara’s day, waiting for another night. Yet he took time to sketch some of the patients, their comatose faces as they slept off their malaria. I liked the idea that he hadn’t been chastened into giving up his sketching.
As we arrived in Jani at first light the next day, Christine forgot her nausea and peered through the red film of dust on the truck window as if she expected to spot her father’s camera crew at work under the shade trees. Jani looked sublime, a meeting of rivers among enormous granite peaks. Unlike the river at Himbol, water ran here, broad slow strands among boulders.
But the climate was savage. Lady Julia had a watch which told the temperature and the humidity. She pointed out to me what it said. Ninety-eight degrees, it read, and ninety-three percent. Lady Julia’s fair skin had taken on a stewed look here at the bottom of Jani’s deep valley.
I would have been happy to see Masihi, too. But all I could see in the undergrowth were peasant wives hiding their faces—their noses, too, with the gilded marriage bands in them—behind brilliant shawls. Young goatherds watered their goats in the river, but they did it with the look of people who would soon take shelter. On the edges of the scrub, a few farmers were persuading their camels in under the cover of trees.
When the truck could not go any farther, we covered it with a tarpaulin and piny branches from the river oaks just as we had with our earlier vehicle outside She’b, the green one with Deutsche Arbeiter Bund on its side. I was cowed by the energy with which Moka worked at this—the rest of us were sapped and broken. Lady Julia helped Christine up to a bunker on the banks of the stream. It looked exposed to me, and I was concerned for them. Yet the place was entirely covered with thorn bushes, botany’s chief gift to the Eritrean cause. Locusts had not been here to strip the foliage.
Christine’s arms hung limp as she walked in Julia’s embrace. The price of being Masihi’s daughter, I thought, my imagination broiling away.
“EPLF tetracycline for your stomach,” Moka had called after her, echoing Askulu in She’b. “We shall get you some here!”
He had great confidence that a barefoot doctor in the Eritrean wilderness was worth two or three physicians anywhere else.
At last, after going away to make inquiries, he led Henry and me into the bunker’s second room. Through an open door into the back of the hut we could hear Christine still retching. Still observing Henry’s demand that he shouldn’t tote other people’s gear, Moka watched us lay our packs on the clay benches where we were meant to sleep. A box of Soviet grenades sat at the base of my bench. I wondered how volatile they might be in this inflamed air.
Moka said, “This time they say Masihi is sleeping in the bunker of the Eritrean food official across the river.” But even he seemed to be getting skeptical about reports of Masihi.
“You meaning to sleep?” Henry asked me.
I said no. I was very angry with Masihi, the delinquent father whose abandoned child was groaning in the next room. “We might as well go and find the bastard,” I said, “and be done with it!”
“I might join you,” Henry said. “No son-of-a-bitch can sleep in this place. What a fucking sex aid! A box of grenades!”
Henry and I wanted to go across the river at once, and Moka was willing to lead us. Traversing the river boulders we could see among the trees on the far shore a birdlike flash of green or gold in the undergrowth where peasant wives were socializing. Village militiamen sat by camels and nursed their Kalashnikovs in the shade and laughed with each other. They had such leisure only every so many months, on the recurrent date that the Eritrean Relief gave out the food ration to their particular village.
But from the gods’ eye of the MIGs, there would have been nothing to see now except a wide valley in which the sun reverberated and, of course, three fools crossing the riverbed.
Moka filled the time telling us the granite peak above us was dedicated to the Prophet. During Mohammed’s exile from Arabia, the Prophet’s horse had jumped from this mountain, totally bypassing Jani, landing among the tangle of mountains beyond, toward the Hallal Front.
“The fucking horse knew what it was doing,” Henry said.
We passed over the last river boulders into the cover of river oaks. I saw at the heart of the grove orderly mounds of aid bags, of sorghum, rice, powdered milk, beans. Moka led us down the avenues of these squared-off stockpiles. Each bag boasted discreetly of the generosity of this or that democracy.
The bunker of the Eritrean official who minded the food dump was dug profoundly into the ground. We entered it down earth stairs. The heat had pooled unspeakably in there. I could see two figures: a prone one on a bench, completely encased in a cloak, who might have been Masihi, and at the desk an Eritrean, a ledger covered with Tigrinyan script opened in front of him. Light came in through a breezeway between the props of the walls and the log roof. It struck the official in the face as he rose to meet us.
“Salaam,” he murmured to Moka, and the two of them exchanged as much formal handshaking as they could manage in the heat. The official seemed exhausted from issuing food all night—his eyes kept rolling up; the whole business of focus evaded him. In the deeper reaches of the bunker I saw a small cache of bags, stacked neatly—his own ration of food. It was a scanty reward for working here, in this pit of treacly air.
The man kept shaking his head in answer to Moka.
“Oh God!” said Henry. “The son-of-a-bitch ain’t here either!”
At last Moka admitted us to the conversation.
“This is not Masihi,” he said, pointing to the shrouded figure who did not move. “Masihi was here but is gone—into the mountains near the Hallal Front to escape the heat.”
“Oh shit!” Henry said.
Moka, sheepish, led us back to our hut by a quicker route, over the river, along the boulder-strewn shoulder of granite, beneath the peak sacred to the Prophet’s nag. Great marbles of stone had been tilted against each other here, and wherever they made a cave or anything as minor as a niche, children were sitting, chanting lessons with an energy my airless brain couldn’t even aspire to.
“Who can write the t?” I heard a teacher cry. And then, “Is he right? Is he right?”
“A regional school,” said Moka, almost apologetically. “They live here among the rocks and they learn here.”
In shadows cast by two tilted megaliths lay a shaven-headed boy, wrapped in his blue cloak but with his face showing. He seemed comatose. Moka deftly bent, barely breaking stride, and raised the boy’s eyelid.
“Malaria,” he told us.
Above our heads, in thorn bushes among the boulders, hung small nes
ts of blanket and wooden lath. Here the students slept. “It is a boarding school,” Moka couldn’t stop himself explaining, even though he knew Henry would mysteriously curse the news.
We found Lady Julia sitting on a stone bench just inside the door of our billet. She stood up when she saw us and showed no particular tiredness.
“I could tell he wouldn’t be here,” she said when we broke the news.
“How could you tell that?” I asked her.
“An instinct. I mean, you don’t go missing for fourteen years and then let yourself be found too easily.”
“But he doesn’t know Christine’s coming for him.”
“Maybe he’s got agents,” said Lady Julia, closing her eyes.
She was working in a notebook and had already checked what hour the patients would begin to attend clinic in the groves of Jani—4:30 that afternoon. Her mind was on that, and on her survey of the trauma which African tradition imposed on women.
Moka started to wheeze. “I know the exact village Masihi has gone to. It is high up and the air is dry. The Ethiopians burned it during the Silent Offensive, but it has been ours since then.”
Lady Julia asked, “Could we go there then after clinic hours? This heat is not very helpful to Christine.”
“Before dawn tomorrow,” said Moka. It seemed to be a message we were hearing all the time these days.
“Why not dusk today?” asked Henry, sinking onto his bench, lolling sideways without bothering to take his boots off.
“Before dawn,” Moka pleaded, wary of an outburst from Henry. “Otherwise you cannot see anything of Jani at night.”
Henry did not react. He may already have been asleep.
But I did not sleep. My back burned beneath me on the air mattress. The most beautiful African wasps, gold and black, full of subtle poison, carried on their trade between the bunker window and their nest high in the wall. I began to get near-hallucinations of the new child’s face, the one obviously Bernadette’s and just as obviously not mine. I had laid eyes on this baby just once, but that sighting came potently back to me now. She was my abandoned daughter, my Christine. Whose name I didn’t know.
To Asmara: A Novel of Africa Page 19
